Musing on yoga, wellness and living a healthy, happy life

Spirit

January 25, 2015

You do not have to tell someone who is in love with life and deeply connected to themselves and the world around them not to commit murder. They wont.

Anytime I am in a situation where there are pages and pages of rules, it is a sign of disconnection. If it is at work, it is a sign of disconnection from the task at hand, the job or the employees. If it is in a relationship, it is a sign of disconnection from the other person. If it is rules that we are putting on ourselves, it is a sign of disconnection from ourselves.

Instead of laying down more rules, ask yourself, "how did this disconnection come about and how can I get connection back?"

September 03, 2014

This amazing article on Yin Yoga.com talks about how, in certain situations, stress is needed to strengthen even the most fragile bodies. While I love this article, what a lot of modern yogis fail to talk about is energetics. I understand that energies can't be measured and often go under the category of quakery and yogic delusions, however, the movement of stagnant energy has always been apart of yoga. The yogis understood the nadis or the energy channels of the body and how yoga poses effected them. Sometimes the body needs to be stressed to awaken energy in the body and to move out mental traumas that have gotten stored in the tissues and in the mind.

It is commonly accepted, even in the medical community, that people can feel pain long after a trauma has been physically healed. Yoga can be used to get rid of mental samskaras, or ruts in our minds, that result in us being mentally and physically in pain long after the events in our lives have passed. To do that, a person needs to be uncomfortable. They need to come face to face with the uncomfortable sensations and the perceived limitation.

Do No Harm?

Every yoga teacher wants to do good for his or her students: like doctors we strive to "do no harm." But, unfortunately, harm sometimes occurs. Teachers are no different in their intentions than nurses and doctors, but the prescriptions offered by teachers may be just as dangerous for the student as a well-intentioned prescription issued by a physician. Iatrogenics is not mistakes by a doctor, it applies to situations where a doctor followed all the right protocols and procedures, the right medicine was issued, the patient took it in the right doses and times, but the patient died because of all these "right" processes, not in spite of these instructions.

This can and does happen in a yoga class as well. The teacher may follow all the instructions she learned in her teacher training course, she may have followed the latest discussions about whether to bend the knees or not while in a forward bend, whether to stress the spine or not if the student has osteoporosis, to find the right alignment for the neck in headstand, and the student may follow the instructions perfectly, and still an injury may result, not in spite of the right instructions being given and followed, but because they were given and followed.

Let's examine just one illustrative example: a student comes to a yoga class for the first time, approaches the teacher and explains that she has osteoporosis in her lumbar spine. The teacher, well-trained and knowledgeable about osteoporosis, acknowledges the students conditions and offers directions and alternatives for her: she prohibits the student from any flexion at all in the spine, restricts twisting to the upper back only and then, only mildly, and also limits the amount of extension in backbends. The teacher rightfully believes that the student is close to the point labeled (B) in figure 3, but she prescribes for her student stress levels only at point (A), which is none at all. The teacher helps the student to minimize all stress to the lower back and checks constantly on the student to make sure that she is comfortable in every pose. Props are the student's constant companions every time she comes to that class.

What is comfortable makes us fragile![7] The noble intention to do no harm to the student by making her comfortable, by minimizing or eliminating stress to the damaged areas causes those areas to become more and more fragile. Her lumbar joints atrophy further because of the reluctance of the teacher (and thus the student) to place any stress there. The student's back becomes as fragile as a porcelain frog. The teacher's intentions are commendable: her teaching harmful.

Risks & Rewards

William Broad's articles and book, The Science of Yoga, caused controversy and debate in the yoga community when he listed many of the ways, through anecdotes, that yoga was causing harm to students. He was accused of shoddy reporting, selective sampling, and sensationalism. His stated aim was to make students aware of the "risks and rewards" of yoga.[8] Broad was warning about the dangers of going too far, of employing too much stress, of going beyond point (B) of figure 3, and of iatrogenics - the harm caused by yoga even when it was properly taught. Again, this was not to imply that all yoga is harmful: it isn't - yoga can be lifesaving and is very healthy and healing for most people, but not for everyone all the time. A reaction set in when the book was released which saw many yoga teachers go to the other extreme: if too much stress or challenge was bad, then it is better to have none at all. They went to point (A) on our curve. Dogmatic assertions switched from "always do this pose this way," to "never do that pose that way." But dogma is still dogma: Paul Grilley is fond of saying, "Never is never correct and always is always wrong."[9] As doctors have long known, we cannot have one prescription that will work for every patient. That is an important understanding, but it is one that is very hard to put into practice.

There are yoga teachers who insist that students must never do Pigeon Pose, or Headstand, or --- pick an asana. There are teachers who claim that every time any student does a forward fold, whether standing or sitting, their knees mustbe bent. There are teachers, who, following their training, or their own experience, or even guided by valid logic, insist that students must always or never do such-and-such. Unfortunately, the reality is - by trying to do no harm, we may be preventing our students from getting the stress that they need to be healthy: we are making them fragile. Certainly, there are some students who really should not be stressing the challenged area. The problem is - how to know which student is which? Like the doctors who don't know in advance which patient will be cured by chemotherapy and which patient will be killed by it, yoga teachers can't know in advance what really is going to be best for our students.[10]

It may seem quite counterintuitive to suggest that someone who has a fragile or damaged spine should deliberately stress it. The obvious course of action is to give it rest, but this debate has run its course in terms of women's recovery after childbirth. At the turn of the 20th century the prevailing wisdom prescribed lots of bed rest to allow the new mother to recover her strength. In time it was realized that this was the worst thing to do for most mothers: they needed to become mobile as soon as possible. Indeed, a study published in Lancet suggests that bed rest is never a good idea for any conditions.[11] By subjecting ourselves to small amounts of stress, we become antifragile. Figure 4 shows this graphically: if we extend Nassim Taleb's logic to people who are injured, we find that they still need some stress or they will risk becoming more and more fragile.

September 01, 2014

When what you say, do, and think is all on one accord, your energy is harmonized and you draw situations and people to you that are vibrating on that same frequency. This applies to every one. "Bad" people. "Good" People. All people.

Even though my thoughts on spirituality have shifted, I was raised Christian. Galations 6:7-9 states,

7 Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.

8 For he that soweth to his flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption; but he that soweth to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting.

9 And let us not be weary in well doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not.

I was taught that this verse from Galatians meant, if you do bad things, you get bad back. I expected all my so called enemies to fall on bad luck because I was a "good" person and good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people. However, I saw that both "good" and "bad" people fell on hard times. That both "good" and "bad people prospered.

Another way to look at, "you reap what you sew" is what you put out you get back. For a person who is sewing from a place of the flesh, if they get back what is of the flesh, then they were successful. Again, the verse speaks to alignment.

I also have realized that "bad" and "good" are often constructs of our mind and a matter of perspective. If a housing development gets torn down to build a mall,who is the bad guy? To the people who open businesses in the mall, the owner of the mall, the contractors who build the mall, the people who receive jobs in the new mall, the city that gets new revenue and the businesses around the mall who enjoy increased traffic, the opening of the mall is very good.

To many of the people who lost their homes and the community that was decimated in the construction, the building of the mall is bad. Many may see it is a sign of the homogenization of their city and fear that crime will go up and that riff raff will now walk the streets of the remaining neighborhoods. Now their picturesque parks and landscapes is a parking deck. The opening of the mall is bad.

Who in this story should prosper? Who prospers is outside of our own thoughts on what is good or bad. It is about alignment. The best thing a "good" person can do in this world, is to focus on your own alignment. Be sure and unwavering about your own path so it unfolds in a way that is conducive to your own development.

August 28, 2014

The only happiness that can stay constant is unconditional happiness. Happiness that is not dependent on any cause, person, place, thing or event. Once the event goes away, the happiness goes. Our happiness must be self generated. Our happiness must be in spite of and outside of what we are seeing with our eyes.

August 26, 2014

Don't get mad at yourself when you find yourself falling back into old mental patterns. It is just a sign that you are in need of some fine tuning. Fine tuning is apart of the growth process. It is easy to clean up our surface patterns but sometimes things go so deep that they don't come up until later. Embrace the process.